Nostalgie de la boue (English: "nostalgia for mud") is a French phrase meaning the attraction to low-life culture, experience, and degradation, found at times both in individuals and in cultural movements.^[1]

The phrase was coined in 1855 by Émile Augier.^[2]

Psychological underpinnings

Marion Woodman the Jungian considered that a break or katabasis from the normal social world could leave the protagonist trapped by "a yearning for what I call pig consciousness—wallowing in mud and loving it".^[3]

Helen Vendler considered that something of the kind happened to Seamus Heaney when, after a venture in abstraction, he recoiled to ground himself in a material world of mud and dirt.^[4]

Examples

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Classical

• Tacitus records the emperor Nero's liking for roaming the streets of his capital in a slave disguise, stealing and assaulting passers-by in the company of his friends.^[5]
• Petronius highlights the kind of Roman lady who "looks for something to love among the lowest of the low...heated up over the absolute dregs".^[6]

Modern

• The 1890s was notable for a mix of high culture and low experience, as seen in figures like Joris-Karl Huysmans.^[7]
• The youthful Bob Dylan would claim that "The only beauty's ugly, man...the hard filthy gutter sound".^[8]
• Jonathan Ames described himself as drawn to prostitutes and the gutter by nostalgie de la boue.^[9]
• Tom Wolfe described a party in New York in 1970: "It was at this party that a Black Panther field marshal rose up beside the north piano—there was also a south piano—in Leonard Bernstein’s living room and outlined the Panthers’ ten-point program to a roomful of socialites and celebrities, who, giddy with nostalgie de la boue, entertained a vision of the future in which, after the revolution, there would no longer be any such thing as a two-story, thirteen-room apartment on Park Avenue, with twin grand pianos in the living room, for one family.^[10]